This weekend sees the launch of Britain's largest archaeological excavation, against a chorus of protest from professional archaeologists.

The project involves 1,000 test pits of one metre square, which will be dug across the country, in back gardens, allotments, school grounds and patches of wasteland, monitored live on television by Channel 4's popular archaeology programme, Time Team.

The Big Dig experiment starts with a programme broadcast live tomorrow from Great Easton, a Domesday village in Leicestershire...